A Handbook For My Lover

by Rosalyn D'Mello

  You are, at this moment, in Kanchaburi, at a lower altitude, where the weather also changes quickly. I asked you if it was dramatic, you said it wasn’t like in Mashobra. ‘You have the mist and the darkening of the light and trees around … I am on a flattish golf course with mountains at the far end.’ You sent me pictures yesterday, and pointed out the rain clouds hovering over the hills of Burma, the land of your ancestors. You are somewhere near the River Kwai, with your recently discovered cousin, and you are looking to cross over into Burma.

  For a change, I left two days before you. Which meant you had to administer to your house, ensure things were in place, and I’m quite certain I’ll have to deal with most of it upon my return to Delhi. It pained me to not be there for the opening of your show, but I had to do this, I had to escape, I had to finish this handbook. And you supported my decision. You understood, which meant I didn’t need to offer you any explanations. I did nonetheless, under pressure from mutual friends who were aghast that I should not be there, and because I was so tempted to stay. It was the same show you were mounting that had first made me fall in love with you, back then, when I had no clue who you were. I saw the show at the National Museum and I fell in love. I had no idea what you looked like in person, whether you were single or attached, or whether I would ever even make your acquaintance. There was something compelling about your way of looking at the world; the domesticity of the everyday and its potential for glory, and at people, lovers, and their private grief. I had this feeling then that these photographs could not have been independent of you, they were so specific to your life, and your personality. And being at the opening would have been like coming full circle, from not knowing you to knowing you better than most anyone else. I would have been a part of that series that dates to the seventies and the eighties, before I was even born. But then, the other morning, a few days before I was to leave, you came into the bedroom and found me splayed upon your bed. The night had been humid, and I’d taken off my shirt, hoping it would be cooler. You had this way of looking at me, and as you exited the room, you made this gesture, as if you were photographing me, you mimed the act of looking into your camera, composing a frame, and immortalising this moment of nakedness. And that’s when I realised that I am already a part of your world and your work.

  Over the last few days we spent together, I caught you looking at me constantly, as if you were making mental notes about my body and its movements, archiving them for future indulgence. It reminded me of the second time I had come to Delhi to visit you. The morning I was to leave, you made me eat a bowl of cornflakes and have a cup of tea so I wouldn’t starve. You had been sitting across the table from me, and at one point you got up to go to your study. I continued chomping away at the cornflakes, pensive about leaving, but so filled with your scent and your touch, I couldn’t but be content. It was a while before I noticed you standing on the sidelines photographing me.

  I’ve come to understand that you are the kind of person that touches the world through your sight. You gaze at things that you covet. I’d often wondered how you could possibly resist touching my dark, naked body lying beside you all sun-kissed and yearning, until one morning I opened my eyes to find you poised towards me, staring at my breasts, and when you noticed I was awake, you ran your fingers playfully over them, as if they were trekking towards a summit.

  It is through your eyes that you reveal your lust. When you travel, when you’re away for two weeks to a month, what I miss most is the sumptuous feeling of being desired by you, of being the object of your gaze.

  The wind has begun to roar. I can hear the cantankerous drops of rain announce themselves on the tin of the roof above me. I have been cocooned inside this loft for more than seventy-two hours, on a bonafide writer’s retreat. I spoke to Partho, my unofficial archivist, last evening over Google chat, and I told him how being here in the midst of my solitude compels me to meditate, and I find myself reflecting on the person I’ve allowed myself to become over these last six years that I have known you. ‘You’re meeting yourself in the mirror,’ he said.

  I discovered, among many other things, that you and I are now in possession of a history. Habits have long since leaked between us. We have our own private rituals that individuate our love. Which is perhaps why the fear of what will transpire if we were to part is more pronounced than it ever has been. Our lives have become so intertwined that to extract one from the other seems nigh unthinkable. Like Changez, the Pakistani protagonist in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, notes about his affair with Erica, a fragile woman who is still haunted by the premature death of her first love and finds herself unable to ‘be’ with him: It is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship. Try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us.

  Two weeks ago we came dangerously close to experiencing the pain of detachment. You’d called me around 6 p.m., asking me to bring you an envelope. There was no trace of urgency in your voice, and so I took my time. When I finally arrived at your house, you were livid.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

  ‘At home, working …’

  ‘Did you bring the envelope?’

  ‘I did,’ and I fished it out from my bag. It was the wrong kind. You wanted the cardboard one.

  ‘I have to send out this package in the next half an hour! Some help you are!’

  I rushed over to my place and brought the cardboard one. When I returned I explained to you that you hadn’t at all indicated that this was an emergency. I knew not to take offence at your accusation of my being unhelpful. I had spent at least ten hours over the last three days helping you with your funding proposal and, if needed, could compose an entire litany of the many favours I’d done for you over just the last few weeks.

  ‘I tried to call you, why can’t you pick up your phone?’

  ‘I was probably in the shower.’

  ‘Just get out. Just go. Leave me alone.’

  Ordinarily I would have stayed and calmed you down. But at that moment what was important was for you to have that package dispatched. So I gathered my things and left.

  I didn’t hear from you at all that night. You ignored my calls and my inquisitive messages went unanswered. I restrained myself from breaking down into grief, all the time believing that what you needed was simply a little space.

  I refrained from calling you the next day too, distracting myself with household chores. Occasionally I wept. Steadily, I began to alternate between grief and despair. I decided I would walk by your house that evening and see if you were there so I could explain myself.

  Around 8 p.m., I headed out from the back lane that is the shortcut to your house. I cut through the kids’ park that serves as a midpoint between your house and mine. I entered your lane and found your car was missing, which meant you were away. Despite having in my possession the keys to your flat, I decided against letting myself in.

  Now on the verge of heartbreak, I traced my steps back to the park and instead of exiting and heading back to my place, I found myself walking towards the swings that were, at this late hour, entirely vacant. The park, usually filled with housewives trying in vain to shed years of accumulated cellulite, and the incessant murmur of kids all haloed with the aura of childhood innocence, was desolate.

  I rested my sling bag against one of the four poles that bore the weight of the swing, and perched myself on the wooden seat. I raised both my legs so they lay mid-air, parallel to the ground, and placed my palms against the iron loops. Then I pushed myself backwards to initiate movement and as I swung forward, moved my legs downwards to create leverage. After several repetitions of this action, I was oscillating to and fro, and as I moved I began to dwell on the polarities of these two entities. To and fro began to resemble distinct territories and the few stretches
of invisible land in between felt like a threshold, a gateway. I wasn’t entirely sure what these two spatial masses represented; sometimes they seemed to symbolise my own indecision, my constant back and forth between surrendering to you or abstaining from you because of the inherent dead-end our relationship embodied; sometimes this in-between zone felt like the safety of a terminal where I could momentarily reflect and indulge in the act of waiting for you to decide for me, or to influence my decision; sometimes it felt tainted by the exhausting pathos of displacement that the toing and froing from my house to yours and yours to mine was imbued with, a tiring restlessness because it meant I had to deny myself the privilege of attachment to either residences, leaving me with no claim to sanctuary, and so this mid-point between to and fro revealed itself as a refuge for my exiled state of being.

  When I returned to my house, the withdrawal symptoms spurred by the absence of communication with you had begun to set in. I found myself devoid of appetite. I was enraged by your audacity and yet, the threat that always loomed, that one day, you and I, for whatever reason, might cease to be an entity, suddenly became alarmingly real.

  I discovered that I had enough strength in me to survive this impending heartbreak. Having been through past loves that had betrayed their inclination towards immortality, I knew I was resilient enough to get over you, to possibly love again, and to even find contentment.

  But what frightened me was the breadth of our sensual attachments, and reading the first chapter of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or The Remembrance of Things Past, seemed to intensify my fear that despite every effort I might eventually make to place you in past tense, the persistence of memory would ensure that you’d keep returning to me like a ghost, because, as science itself has demonstrated, ‘the olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain’s limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born, and emotional memories stored, that’s why smells, feelings, and memories become so easily and intimately entangled’.

  When Proust narrates what has now become an immortal literary experience, his act of eating petites madeleines with tea, he steers his brilliant first chapter towards a haunting finish with this ominous paragraph:

  … But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in their tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

  One of the earliest smells I associate with you is from our first morning together. You had heated water, then poured it into the kettle to make what would be my first Castleton brew. You’d fried eggs, sunny-side up, and placed them on two plates. Then you took a tomato, sliced it into two, did the same with a ripe green capsicum, and placed them both upon the now scalding surface of the same frying pan, in the other corner of which you added four long bits of Pigpo’s special pork sausage. You let them sizzle in their collective juices and sprinkled coarse specks of ground pepper. The mad, ravenous scent of pork fat melting against the heat and mingling with the plump tomato juice, the capsicum grazing against the sides of the pan, being scorched by the livid sizzle, causing it to surrender to its outer body all the goodness it had stored within; all of this collided with the humid August air and when I finally tasted the meal you had prepared and partaken of the smoky Darjeeling, I found I had stumbled into a different state of consciousness. I had the distinct feeling of something momentous having occurred inside my body, a contradictory sensation where the act of sating my hunger was awakening in me fresh hunger … I was beyond satisfied and yet I wanted more, I yearned to sample all the other scents I was certain you had stored within the repository of your kitchen, I longed to add scents from my own repertoire so that we could collaborate to co-create a veritable encyclopedia of the most exquisite tastes and smells.

  There were things I had never allowed myself to taste until you coaxed me into it by lecturing me about their innate goodness, their nutritional qualities. Like sprouts. I spent most of my life resisting the raw, crispy, sap-like taste they unleashed upon my palette. But after your having prepared them for me, freshly sprouting them in your kitchen, I find that I can devour a plateful at any hour of the day, and most of all because the taste they bear is so attached to the two-months when I lived with you, during the last quarter of our first year together. Or bitter gourd. You would slice it into rings and fry each piece in oil, keep them aside as you then proceeded to caramelise onion rings. You’d then mix the two humble ingredients together and they would, in a single morsel, become so much more than the sum of their parts; the crispy bitterness of the karela would mingle with the dank brown sugariness of caramelised onion, and for someone whose palette is already predisposed towards the unity of savoury and sweet, the combination proved irresistible. Or the simplicity of bread and butter, the very thought of which makes me salivate. We enjoy breaking bread together, and I remember how once you actually brought back a slice from a larger loaf of sour dough bread all the way from London just because you so wished that I should participate in the experience of having tasted it and of having known the pleasures of sourness and the magic of yeast. And lest we forget the peatiness of single malt that I am indebted to you for introducing me to. I was never one for whisky. The first time I stepped past the threshold of your house, you kept my bags in the bedroom while I surveyed the insanity of your interiors that displayed every symptom of the pathological condition of hoarding, you led me into the living room that shares its space with the kitchen, sat me down on the divan, and asked me if I’d like a drink. I was, like I told you, still a victim of the ex-lover’s acts of romantic terrorism, and I had never felt so much relief at leaving Bombay and being in Delhi. You poured me a glass of Laphroaig, and when I took the first sip, was overcome by the liquid smokiness, the golden scent that bore evidence to its maturity, its having lived for at least twelve years in a state of situ so that one day its patience might be savoured by the tongue of an elegant alcoholic. Every sip of single malt I have ever had since then has always born a singular memory: of having finally arrived home.

  The monstrous thing about memory is that it is involuntary, that try as we may, we cannot extinguish its potent ability to invade our present without any prior notice, it lurks within our subconscious like a beast that can strike at any given moment without our having to incite it, rendering us powerless against its assault. Even the loss of memory or the inability to remember incidents at will, except for mere disconnected fragments, is nothing short of tragic. Memories that were born of beauty can turn sour if the circumstances devolve, and the memory of a memory creates a fresh memory so that what we have is a multiplication of memories.

  That night, empty and forlorn, with yet no word from you, I found myself in mourning. Not because I had lost you, I knew you would eventually come around, and as long as I had your key, I had access to your life. But I grieved at the thought of all that would forever be lost to me if you and I were to end whatever there is between us. Red wine, bourbon, Darjeeling tea, Goan sausages, Monaco jeera biscuits, cheeses of every kind, even blue cheese—which you hate, because I will always remember that you never had the taste for it—Kakaji potato chips, peanuts, cold cucumber soup, buttermilk, lime juice, Old Monk, pesto, pasta, raspberries, muskmelon, mango milkshakes, mutton xacuti, tandoori chicken, Khow suey, stir-fried strips of yellow and red bell peppers, French beans pan-fried with garlic and pepper, prawn balachao, bacon, porridge, kebabs, croissants, butter …You have imbued yourself in everything! No taste or smell is devoid of you, not even the ones that have yet to be sampled.

  Above all else, you nourish the insides of my being with pleasure. And that is what all the sights and smells and tastes represent. You have made yourself the frequent cause of a
nd witness to the intense gratification of my senses. You bring meaning to all that I experience, because in the retrospective act of sharing it with you or recounting it to you, it becomes something more, it is ameliorated, enhanced and archived. It is through you that I convert my most moving experiences into memories.

  And though I mourned, prematurely, the impending loss of my sensual connection to all that is delicious and good because their raison d’etre is you, I will not regret, should we come to pass, the immensity of these memories we will have created. I will not wish they could somehow be erased. I will not, like Eloisa in Alexander Pope’s poem ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, crave the ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’. I will simply learn to live in exile as love’s refugee.

  The next morning, after yet another unsuccessful attempt to reach you, I sent you a slew of messages informing you that through your silence, you were mocking me, inflicting my routine with undertones of misery, that your sarcastic statement about me not helping you enough was far from the truth. To put things in perspective, I reminded you that I’d spent the last two weeks helping you in innumerable ways and yet, there were just three things I had asked of you in return: to bring over the extra swivel chair lying in your office that you had promised me months ago, to take a mug shot of me that I could use when I contributed to magazines, and to spare half an hour for me so I could speak to you about this handbook. You had done none of these.